"...wickedly primordial, visionary—a psycho-spiritual reckoning..."

Our Father in the Year of the Wolf tells the story of a cursed father and son—monsters forced to relive the sins of generations past. Through cyclical, lyric poems, Harrity deftly braids together motifs from horror, pop-culture, and biblical literature into a winding and complex narrative about the trauma and fragmentation of a rural family, our animal commonness, the chaos of our hidden violence, and the brutalities of our histories come back to haunt us.

“Our Father in the Year of the Wolf is beautiful. But its beauty is its own: These poems refuse the easy richness of lyrical language while retaining the rhythms of lyrics of high intensity.”—Shane McCrae

“These mysterious [poems], lush and surprising, dramatize the corporeal manifestations of our most primal emotional and spiritual natures. How like us these formally inventive poems look on the page: broken, yet whole.”—Martha Serpas

"If not for the resilience of the speaker, the resourcefulness of the prosody, I might be at a loss. Harrity reckons with a father-wound so brutal that it has left him not only raving but vulnerable and exposed."—L.S. Klatt

“[These poems] have weight and body and funk, and they billow. When you read them you want to eat and scream, preen and sex. Read them … where the throng of human stinks the best.”—Matthew Lippman

"...a handbook for renewal of creative vision—incarnation at work in space and time..."

"In this fine book The Word becomes both flesh and some very good words too! Let a master lead you in putting many parts of your soul together. This is incarnation at work in space and time!"

—Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation

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"Harrity also shows himself sensitive to how words work and achieve their powerful effects, how they emphasize and energize and create anticipation, preserve the mysterious, and invite and refine the messiness of lived experience. Sometimes Harrity's writing reveals him to be an impressively mystical counselor, but usually he is attentive to his readers in a pragmatic way—he wants to help them become more attentive themselves, to words, but also to the world, and to the way we honestly see the world—to ways we may be called to speak for the world."

—Bret Foster, Wheaton College

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“I think many individuals and groups will point back to Making Manifest years from now and see it as a beginning—a renewal of creativity and vision. This book offers exactly the challenges and encouragements we need to come to terms with the big questions in and outside the Church.”

These Intricacies is a book of poems traversing the intersection of family, fatherhood, and faith. Set in shifting, vibrant spaces of a rich Kentucky landscape, and wrought with metaphysical crisis, this collection charts the slow, seismic shifts of growth bound up in understanding the nature of home. Suspended between struggle and tranquility, the poems in These Intricacies evoke a contemplative exploration of masculinity and vocation as the poet and reader journey together to discover and dissolve the discontinuities of how we are loved and how we can love others.

"This collection of elemental Kentucky poems will land "like starlight in your throat." You will want to sing Dave Harrity aloud to find that "words have wombs," that what he calls the dusk in our bodies, our "cairns of guilt," still birth and mark dim paths of light. These Intricacies will clear a way into your own and leave you grateful for each twist and sudden turn. Like St. Augustine, "Take and read.""—Paul Willis

"In these poems, Dave Harrity invites us—into the poems, yes, but also into thought and quiet and a contemplative solitude rare in our century. Here is a poet attentive to the worlds beyond us and the worlds within us. Here are poems that appreciate creation’s perfection and life’s imperfection. These Intricacies reveals stars and stone walls and kitchen windows—those things I thought I already knew—with unfamiliar and welcome clarity."—Lynn Domina

"Intricate only begins to describe the delicate, strong, interlaced qualities of Dave Harrity's poems. Because he values this world in all its complexity, Harrity refuses to reduce any part of creation to a single feature. Each poem here is a complex weaving of poetic attention--image, voice, line, diction, and, especially, tone--into an honest, lamenting, desiring voice that embodies the human necessity "to turn away the dark, / to call down light from stars.""—David Wright

"Dave Harrity metes out his keen sense of our material reality in These Intricacies with an undeniable spirit-eye: a gun shop houses beasts, the throat starlight; guilt builds a little cairn, belief a hand of wings; the body makes room for dusk but cannot deny its uncertain history—those “many accidents it took to make this skin.” I’m punctured by all that’s hallowed and harsh in these poems. What’s more: I’m thankful."—Susanna Childress

"These Intricacies is a welcomed new voice in American poetry for the muscle and soul and lyric vision it offers us. Not may poets today will write a long, complex line of questioning, digging, and seeking visceral answers to spiritual questions, ways to bury doubt or reveal belief, as Harrity does."—Jeanie Thompson